Tag: virginia

Vaya con dios, [redacted location]

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that I’m a person of any importance in the world, but all the same, I’m generally intentionally vague when it comes to giving out too many specific details of my life.  I’m sure the internet is ripe with all sorts of information about me, my family, and people I associate with if anyone were so inclined to want to dig, but all the same I prefer to not give too much intel away willy-nilly.

That being said, my family just recently sold my dad’s place up in Virginia, which was a property that I lived in for about seven years, which makes me double take writing that out that I lived there for so short, in the grand spectrum of my life.  But I lived in that town, that county, for 13, which again seems short when I write that out, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that I spent my formative years up in Virginia, so for better or worse, the place will always hold somewhat of importance to me, regardless of how much I actually don’t really like it up there anymore, save for the fact that much of my family still resides there.

My sister made me realize however, that with my dad’s place sold, my family now no longer owns any property up there, as my mom’s gone the route of mercifully ditching homeownership, and opting to live out her remaining years renting in a home of convenience, which suits my sister and I fine, knowing she’ll be closer to family and living in a place that will take care of things for her instead of relying on her children to make a shit ton of calls and handle everything for her instead.

But the bottom line is that as far as one of our primary childhood towns are concerned, we now no longer have any reason at all to go there ever again.  I didn’t think of it, but it is still a tiny bit jarring to realize that, mostly from the standpoint that neither of us will really have a free place to stay whenever we visit in the future anymore, since my mom’s apartment is adequate for two people, tops, much less my entire family or my sister’s.  Maybe some cousins can harbor us, but the reality is that hotels may need to be leveraged in future visits.

Back to the point though, my sister was right, there’s absolutely no reason for us to ever really visit [redacted] again.  None of my family lives there anymore, my closest friends have all moved away from there, and short of my high school, and any former addresses that would show up if I were ever to need federal clearance again, there’s basically nothing left that ties me to [redacted] anymore.

As nostalgic as I may seem like I’m coming off, when the day is over, it doesn’t really matter much at all.  It’s just the tiniest of swan songs for a place that I haven’t lived in for more than half my life now, and melancholy me just wanting to get some words out about the topic before the recency bias of current events evaporates into the aether.  [Redacted] isn’t even my true hometown, just the place where I probably did the most growing up, and truth be it, I haven’t even really liked the last few times I’ve been up there.  The sprawl has gotten out of control, the infrastructure of the whole area has failed to keep up with the demand of population growth, and I often found myself growing frustrated with the lack of shit, terrible traffic, and the fact that it was one gigantic endless vanilla suburb.

And I hit a fucking deer, in a place where deer probably wouldn’t have been expected, but because of the sprawl and destrucity of nearby nature, the poor deer have little elsewhere to go, so now that I think about it [redacted] can go fuck itself, and good riddance to the place.

Without really even realizing it, I kind of had my swan song up there, the last time I was there, cleaning out all of my dad’s shit.  I drove around, ran around the old lake I used to run on, drove around some more, ate at a newer restaurant that had come into existence, visited my old 7-Eleven.  [Redacted] has changed tremendously from when I used to live there, and will continue to change and fill in all available space long after any traces of my family and I are gone, leaving nothing but memories.

Man, that wasn’t the direction I thought this post would go in when I thought about writing about it, but seems legit enough for me.  With my friends all gone, my family ties now being completely severed, there really is nothing left for me there except nostalgia.

Good riddance, [redacted], who knows when I’ll ever step foot there again.  I’m not much into the idea of high school reunions, and I have enough family and friends in the surrounding area to occupy me in the event I’m ever up adjacent to the area, and maybe when I’m much older and somehow more nostalgic, I’ll take my kids when they’re also older, to maybe take a walk or something around the old lake.

Free is a four-letter word

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And is about as inflammatory and prone to resulting in aggravation, disappointment and general negativity as some of the more notorious four-letter words out there in the common lexicon.

I’ve spent the better part of a week this month at my dad’s old place in Virginia, my old home, cleaning it out, because as he’s no longer living there, the only logical thing to do would be to empty it out and get rid of it.  Of course, that isn’t going to happen on its own, and nobody in my family really seems as eager to not let a valuable asset potential degrade due to neglect as I am, so that has almost entirely fallen on my shoulders to do, despite the fact that I would rather have been doing a hundred other things than driving all the way up there just to clean and struggle to do my job remotely since that home hadn’t had internet access in the last two years.

I had the brilliant analogy that my dad was basically like Wall-E, in the sense that he seemed to collect an inordinate amount of useless and worthless trash and tchotchkes, but he was pretty good at organizing it and making it look fairly orderly within his own home.  However, when it comes to sorting and determining what could be salvaged and what needed to be tossed, it became very, very quickly apparent that the load didn’t jive with the time available, and that pretty much everything needed to be trashed.

It was like an episode of Storage Wars where Dave Hester would always brag about the potential profitability about every single storage unit he won, but that’s because he had a consignment shop where all the bullshit he collected could sit on shelves and make a nickel five months later, as opposed to being moved immediately.  My dad had a lot of stuff that honestly could’ve made a few bucks here and there if time were on our side, but in the span of a week, I wasn’t about to try and organize a last second single home flea market for the legions of crap that my dad had hoarded over the last decade and a half.

Box full of optical mice?  Trash.  Bag full of brand-new commercial painting supplies?  Trash.  Boxes full of partially used duct and electrical tape?  Trash.  Box of tool grade rope?  Crate full of commercial paper towels?  Industrial tubs full of liquid soap?  Trash, trash, trash.

Amidst all the crap were all sorts of personal and family mementos too, stuff that my sister, my mom or myself didn’t take with us when we all inevitably moved out.  And as much as I tend to hesitate when it comes to disposing of anything of such nature, I walked into my week of work with a credo, to harden the heart and let shit go, because otherwise I would accomplish nothing.  If nobody cared about this stuff to take with them when they left, nobody is going to care about it when it’s tossed.

High school yearbooks, shop class projects, little pieces of crap that I may have saved at random points in my life, all part of the trash pile.  I had a moment of quiet shock, when my mom took her wedding photo album and tossed it into a box marked for disposal, but seeing as how they are divorced, it’s understandable, but still no less slightly mortifying as a child of said union.

When my work was done, the house was still in pretty much chaos, but at least it was fairly organized chaos.  Originally, I had planned on just being a repeated shuttle back and forth to the dump to dispose of everything that needed to go, but my aunt and my mom meddled and convinced me to pay for professional disposal.  Having a little experience with it, I knew to expect a bill north of a grand if we were going to go that route, but the thought of saving myself and my car the labor didn’t hurt, so that’s the choice I made, and I made some calls and reached out to a few companies, and landed with one who would come at a later date to come pick up all the trash.

Among all the crap, I had pulled aside some items that even I thought, would go quickly, if offered for free to the community, like some extension ladders, a television, and a weed-wacker.  Long story short, the ladders moved, but with resistance, and I ended up donating the television and the trimmer to Goodwill when neither generated a lick of interest.

Additionally, there were also a lot of furniture that I felt had some value in it, and I figured it shouldn’t be hard to leverage the Salvation Army to come pick up some free furniture that they could then flip at their consignment shops; yes, I’m aware of the general negative reputation the internet has over the SA, but I just wanted to get this house cleared in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible, and in the past I’ve used them to help clear out my old house, and they seemed like a logical option.

After I had left, and the scheduled day of the SA pickup had passed, I called my mom whom I entrusted to be on site to let the SA guys in, and she told me that they took nothing.  They came into the home, examined all the marked items, deemed them not suitable quality, and refused to move anything that required traveling a flight of stairs.  I knew right away that it wasn’t so much that everything I offered was inadequate, as much as it was around 3:30 pm when they showed up to my place, their truck was probably full, the workers were tired, and they simply did not want to go through the labor of hauling off all the stuff I had asked them to.

So I basically got exactly what I had paid for – zero.

There’s the popular adage that people should never stop learning, and it was at this moment that I decided that I have fully learned an important lesson that I will try to implement into my remaining life, and that free, is bullshit, and to look at anything in life that claims to be free, with the skepticism that I would look at anyone proclaiming to be a Nigerian prince.

Free, always sounds awesome, but free comes with a whole slew of conditionals that are mitigated when there’s some form of transactional currency.  And the drawback to free always seems to be at the extreme risk of something often times more valuable than any form of currency, which is time, because with the case of the Salvation Army, their refusal to do their job because their service was free, still cost me a great deal of time, as I did not have a fallback plan, because they did me right in my own previous experience, which was a fallacy in its own right that I need to be mindful of in the future as well.

But I think about all the times in my life where something has been free, whether it’s been me trying to get something, or me trying to give shit away, and almost all of the instances, have involved aggravation, regret, and questioning why I did in the first place.

It’s like the IHOP fallacy, whenever they do like their free pancake day or whatever, you see on the news people who wait hours for a free short stack of pancakes, when that same short stack would’ve cost like $7 and get it immediately if you paid for it, making those who think about it realize that paying > free.

I’ve gone through great lengths in the past to get free bobbleheads at ballparks, and looking back at all those instances, I can count on one hand where it’s actually been worth it, and I actually applaud myself in any instance where I may have self-policed my time versus free scale and altered my choices in the past.

I also think about the sheer aggravation of trying to give stuff away on stuff like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, because it seems like something that should be layups, but the flake rate for free shit is so astronomically high, so often times I just end up throwing perfectly good shit away, because I simply grew exasperated with trying to not be wasteful and giving away perfectly good goods, because I’m just tired of people.

The point of all this is that I have, I truly have, learned, that the word free is not necessarily a good word anymore, and is instead a loaded word, full of conditionals and rules and invisible clauses, that one really needs to understand the risks when they inevitably grow tempted by it, solely because of the potential end result of a transaction with nothing exchanged.

So many times in life, it’s simply better to just grow up, pay up, and get shit done, without any of the bullshit that free entails.

It’s always going to be Springfield Mall

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NBC Washington: non-fatal shooting incident occurs at Springfield Town Center between teenagers arguing about something reportedly nothing and inconsequential

It’s not that often that I think much about my old stomping grounds, and it’s been over a decade since the topic of Springfield Town Center Mall has been in the brog, but here we are, thanks to an eerily accurate feeding from the algorithm to me, letting me know about a shooting incident in the shopping mall that I’d wasted endless amounts of hours of my life at.

As I opined in a comment on social media, they can change the name of the joint, and they can change all the stores inside the place, but Springfield Mall will always be Springfield Mall, a place cursed and destined to be a place of underlying danger and the uneasy feeling shoppers will always have that no matter what things appear around them, they’re not entirely safe.  MS-13 beheadings and 9/11 hijacker presence have a tendency to leave their bad juju on a place, kind of like the premise of The Grudge.

Thinking back to this assessment, it’s almost a miracle that I’m alive, considering the massive amounts of danger commensurate to how much time I spent there probably having increased my mortality rate throughout my teenage years.

It’s the least surprising thing in the world to hear news of spontaneous violence erupting within the walls of Springfield Town Center considering the bones and likely jerry-rigged graves in which the place was built onto, and watching the video of the incident, it doesn’t look like much has changed over the last 10+ years of Springfield Mall’s final days and Town Center’s day-to-day operations.

Shithead teenagers loitering around the place, manifesting beefs out of absolutely nothing, and ultimately erupting into gun violence, what I saw in the video looked like it could’ve been straight out of 1999, minus the taste in fashion, and the presence of bystanders all brandishing smart phones trying to video the incident instead of you know, calling 9-1-1.

Then again, it’s no secret that among the things that carried over from the old days into the current is the physical Fairfax County Police precinct in the mall itself, because nothing says ‘we’re [not] a safe place’ than having to have local cops ready at the helm, within ear shot at any given time.

The point remains, as unfortunate it is to ever hear of gun violence in any way shape or form, it’s good that nobody was killed and the offending parties were apprehended.  But I still admit to being amused at the ironic reality that no matter how much time has passed, no matter that the name of the joint has changed, and no matter how much the insides of the shopping center has changed, nothing will ever, ever change the fact that 6500 Springfield will always be, Springfield Mall.

Thanksgiving musings and perspectives

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the Thanksgiving holiday this year, my house trekked north back up to Virginia to spend some time with my side of the family.  Such was always something I was pretty ambivalent about in the past, but ever since I had kids, I do feel that there is some importance in having them have connection with my side of the family, not to mention try to build relationships with the litany of cousins they have, as I did growing up.

Overall, it was a very good trip, and I’m happy to have spent a good bit of time with my sister, cousins and parents, but most of all, I was happiest that my kids got to spend time with their cousins and my family members and be able to build relationships and connections with family that they don’t get to see too often.  My happiest memories looking back on the trip were seeing my kids playing exuberantly with their cousins, and I’m thankful for my niece, nephew and the kids of my cousins all being so good to my children, and I’m optimistic that they can have a similar upbringing to my own, where the cousins all were pretty tightly knit growing up.

However, an introduction like this doesn’t happen if there weren’t some things that weren’t positive, and unfortunately for this holiday there were some bad things that definitely put a damper on things.

Firstly, to cut to the chase, I hit a deer while driving, and my car suffered a nasty crack on the bumper as well as the headlight assembly.  I was driving along a road that I’d driven thousands of times in my life while living there, and I’d never seen deer on this stretch of road before.  I was probably going no faster than 25-28 mph while accelerating when the deer popped out of a grassy median and it was so bang-bang fast that I was a good 200 feet past and continuing before it really registered what had happened.

The thing is, while on the drive up, I distinctly remembered having a thought about just how many dead deer I had seen on the shoulders all over I-85 in southern Virginia, and how I really should keep my guard up while driving at night on this trip.  But as I said, this was a stretch of road that was long developed, not very close to any real wooded areas where deer might like to reside in, and where I’d never seen deer before in my life.  So my guard was definitely not up at this moment in time, and it just figures that would be when my premonition came to fruition, and I plastered the poor animal.

I replayed the moment in my head countless times at this point and the thing is, I’m not mad at the deer or the species as a whole, like I might’ve been in the past for putting me in this situation.  Northern Virginia is an endlessly developing area, and it’s a no brainer that the constant sprawl and development in Fairfax county and surrounding areas are displacing the wildlife all over, and next thing I know I’m hitting deer in a place where I’d never seen deer before in my life.

What I am thankful for is the fact that nobody in my car was hurt, and to my knowledge nobody behind me appeared to be hurt, as I was the first car in the line of cars turning onto the road, and it looked like there were plenty of braking going on behind me.  My kids were little zombies watching the iPad, so they didn’t notice anything but the sound of impact and the bump of me running it over, and didn’t seem to care because they were too busy watching Little Einsteins.  This wasn’t a conversation that I would’ve wanted to have had, so I take it as a win, on all accounts.

Additionally, despite looking pretty nasty when I originally did stop, when I got to my cousin’s place, we were able to pop the initial dent back out, which was a big victory, as it was pushing the wheel liner into contact with the tire, and there was initial talk about cutting it off in order to remain drivable.  A little duct tape and a few zip ties, and my car was safe enough to have made the return trip to Georgia, to where its repair is now on the table in coming weeks.

Here’s the thing though-as much as something like this probably would have tanked the entire trip for me in the past, I realized that there were so many other victories to be had given the circumstances, that the main L taken that will cost actual money and likely aggravation of playing car Tetris or a rental didn’t seem so bad.  Plus, when I got back to my cousin’s place, dinner was ready, two beers, a fire pit, reminiscing with my cousins while hearing the sound of my kids having a blast with their cousins really rescued the night and I like to think that this was all one of those, you know you’re maturing, kind of scenarios.

Also, waking up to the worst news possible of hearing of a passing of a loved one to my brother’s family really does knock everything else into a genuinely thankful perspective, on Thanksgiving.  Pretty much nothing can top that as far as bad news is concerned, but again, trying to find the silver lining in bad situations, given the circumstances of the departed’s final days, there’s probably a modicum of relief in knowing that they’re no longer in any pain or having to fight the good fight any longer.

As sad and heartbroken I felt for my brother’s family, it really did help put everything else into perspective about the things that myself and everyone else could genuinely be thankful for.  My kids were safe and unaware of the deer situation, most everyone in my family was in good health.  I got to spend some time with my parents with my kids, and I’m glad that my kids have interactions and memories with them, because I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen a grandfather in my life.

Even the whole car debacle afforded me a bonus good memory, because when I took the car on a shakedown ride to make sure it was safe at highway speeds and cornering, I took the opportunity while I was alone to pop by a close friend’s house to say hi and wish them a happy Thanksgiving.

The drive back was long, and doing Richmond to Atlanta was the longest stretch that my kids had ever had to endure in the car, but equipped with a lot of snacks and an iPad full of downloaded shows, they did great.  My only gripe is the feeling of being a glorified Uber driver, since I have to focus on driving, and none of my adult passengers can get their heads off of their phones to actually converse or be remotely the types of passengers to help a ride not feel so long.

But as a whole, I still look back at Thanksgiving positively.  My kids had a great time with my family, and I was happy to catch up with everyone who came to dinner, and I can only hope that future family gatherings in the future will be as good as this one was, but hopefully with no more deer incidents.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Everybody loses: YouTube prankster fucks with the wrong guy, gets shot; prankster in ICU, shooter in police custody

What caught my attention about this story is that it happened up in Northern Virginia, and at a mall that I’ve been to a few times before.  Dulles Town Center, at least when I was still living up there, wasn’t the bougiest mall or wasn’t a Tysons, but was still well shopped as it was way the fuck far away from the blight-spreading that had overtaken Springfield and Landmark malls and was on its way towards Tysons with the expansion of Metro.

But it was still an unfortunate story where a shithead who tries to cultivate internet popularity by performing pranks on usually unwilling participants, tries to pull a prank on the wrong guy, and ends up getting shot in the gut.  The wrong guy, who was just trying to mind his own business and pick up food for a DoorDash delivery, gets pushed into whipping out his piece, is now under arrest, and as said above, everybody loses.

I floated this story to a group chat of close friends, and the general consensus is that the shooter crossed the line by reacting with deadly force, but at the same time, I absolutely don’t think that the prankster is absolved of any fault at all.  Sure, I agree that deadly force should rarely be the answer to anything short of one’s life being threatened in the first place, but I can’t say I entirely agree that the prankster wasn’t asking for it either.

Because I don’t want to give anyone acknowledgment to the shithead prankster and his dumbass YouTube channel I won’t use names or give any links and anyone really curious about this story can probably find it easily on their own, but the guy doing the pranks is a pretty big dude, and I feel like he takes for granted that his stature and the fact that he seems to target less-threatening individuals, probably prevents a lot of people retaliating on him for trying to get a rise out of them.  So when he pressed his luck on a guy who reportedly gave him fair warning as well as tried to swat his phone away from him, I can’t say I feel any modicum of sympathy for him when he got a gun pulled on him. 

Of course the shooter didn’t have to shoot, but we live in a world where there are more unhinged people than ever out there, and the prankster got unlucky to have found one of them with an itchy trigger finger that did the deed.

What’s obnoxious about this story other than the obvious shithead prankster, is that the guy’s dad and grandfather are coming out and trying to defend him for “just trying to have some fun” and other diluted rhetoric that coddles and justifies their shithead son’s bad behavior.  Like if I were the guy’s dad, I’d probably go on record that I don’t condone my son’s behavior, but I wish he’d just got decked instead of shot.

I actually feel sympathy for the shooter, because I’d wager he didn’t wake up in the morning thinking there was any possibility that he was going to end up in jail at some point.  Much less for an altercation that he didn’t initiate.  He was just trying to mind his own business, logged into DoorDash and wanted to make some money, and some shithead bro starts fucking with him, and won’t let up.  Obviously pulling a gun and shooting the guy was extreme, but at some point, people can only get pushed before they are forced to react.

Either way, it’s an unfortunate story where everyone comes out a loser, and I post about it because these are the types of stories that draw my attention when I don’t feel like writing so much and I need to inspire myself to in order to keep up with the habit and practice continuing doing it.

Of course David Chang thinks he’s too good for Costco’s rotisserie chicken

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not surprising, considering he’s an arrogant star-fucker: David Chang declares Costco’s signature $4.99 rotisserie chicken as “inedible”

The last time I brought up David Chang, I stated that I have a love-hate opinion of the guy, concluding that I was like 40-60 in favor of not cool.  But after hearing him shit on Costco’s rotisserie chickens, I think the needle pegs to 0-100.  The second season of Ugly Delicious wasn’t nearly as good as the first, and it’s pretty apparent that he’s so drunk on his own bullshit  and swept up in his own celebrity that he’s incapable of remembering where he probably came from.

Because I would wager money that in his lifetime, he’s consumed a number of Costco rotisserie chickens.  He grew up in the same area where I grew up in Northern Virginia, and regardless of geography, ALL Koreans love going to Costco, because of the savings available there, no matter how rich or poor they are.  And when it comes to getting bargains, pretty much few things on the planet are on the same level as Costco’s rotisserie chickens.

In fact, I bet his own parents in NOVA still go to Costco on the regular, pulling up in their probably Lexus, and there’s even a good chance that they themselves are still buying rotisserie chickens.  Maybe not necessarily to eat straight out of the package, but to shred up and use in a variety of other Korean dishes, that Chang alleges that still learns things from his mom.

But as for Chang himself, it’s clear that he thinks he’s too good for Costco chicken, and that the perma-$4.99 birds are way beneath him.  After spending the last few years gallivanting around the world and eating foreign foods on Netflix’s dime, and kissing the asses of Hollywood celebrities who all always think they’re some global foodies, he’s completely lost touch with the rest of the world that isn’t wealthy, and has jobs that isn’t opening overrated shit restaurants with weeby names despite being Korean, and might actually see Costco chickens as more than just an economic convenience.

Not everyone has the choice to pick Costco over Sprouts Alhambra, because Costco’s chicken is just too economically friendly that they can’t not buy them, even if the company has disclosed they lose money on every bird they sell because they don’t want to lose the customer faith.  To some, Costco chicken is convenient to process into other recipes, and to those who are workout buffs, the chickens are the absolute biggest bang for the buck as far as protein consumption is concerned.

But all this shit is lost on a celebrity fuck-boi like David Chang has become.  Yeah I’m sure he’s manufacturing hot takes like this in order to draw attention to his likely shitty podcast that he’ll probably abandon within six months because nobody is capable of playing the long game, but I don’t think it’s unrealistic to see that he’s gotten a little too big to be able to understand just why Costco rotisserie chickens are so popular.

Perhaps he should stick to trying to rip off Chick Fil-A sandwiches and falling short, or making bougie gourmet mac and cheese that still falls short to Kraft from his own wife.

Now this is actually just like old times

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A little while ago, after I wrote about the amazing finish to the regular season, where the Braves caught the Mets on the final weekend of the season and literally stole the NL East crown right from underneath them, I had this sneaking suspicion that I was tempting fate by doing such, and that once the playoffs began, the Braves would be ripe for a good old fashioned, first round NLDS* collapse, like they had done countless times in the past.  Baby luck was no longer in play, and by acknowledging in text that the Braves were anything other than a garbage organization not worth two pennies rubbed together, I was clearly pressing the boundaries of the universe that my feelings of high on the Braves were doomed to come crashing down once the playoffs actually began.

*can’t call it first round anymore thanks to the new wild card round

The fact that the Braves did in fact, get bounced from the NLDS doesn’t bother me; after all it’s something I’ve seen happen so many times that it’s more of an aberration when it doesn’t happen.  What actually does suck is that it came at the hands of the Phillies, which is a team that I’ve never liked at any point in history, so that part does give me some sour grapes.  If it had happened against the Cardinals, I would’ve been salty but unsurprised because it seemed like the Pujols and Yadi farewell tour would’ve been very appropriate to have had run over the Braves along the way, but when they failed to close out the Phillies in the first game of the wild card series, it was pretty much all downhill from there.

More than any other sport, baseball playoffs has and will always be a game for the team that gets hot at the right time.  Because games are played so closely together, momentum can really hang and maintain in baseball, and throughout the history of the playoffs since the inception of the wild card, so often times is the World Series winner the team that just catches fire and stays on fire for a month.  Aided by the magic baby luck brought on by #2’s birth, the Braves were that team that got hot, and stayed hot, and won it all last year, no matter how unworthy of the playoffs the 88-win team really was.

The Phillies appear to be that team that’s caught fire at the right time, and amazingly they did it in the midst of a game, where they looked all but defeated against the Cardinals, but the switch flipped, they came back on the Cardinals, put them out to pasture, rolled into Atlanta, and put the Braves out of their misery too.

As much as I dislike seeing the Phillies succeed, especially at the expense of the Braves, there’s a sadistic part of me that really wants to see the Padres advance on the Dodgers, so that we have an NLCS between the #5 and #6 seeds, with hopefully the Padres going to the World Series to play against the Seattle Mariners,** in a barn burner of a World Series nobody in the world wants to see.

**at the time I’m writing this, the Mariners have just blinked first in the 18th inning of their elimination game and are on the cusp of getting eliminated  🙁

But as for the Braves, it’s back to being the Barves all over again, getting bounced in the NLDS.  Yes, it’s something that does suck, but honestly?  The good thing about a fairly fresh World Series victory, or any championship for a favored team, is that it always creates a cushion of absorbing the disappointment of future defeats.  I can still say I got to see the Braves win a World Series in my lifetime as a Braves fan and as an Atlanta resident, and because it happened pretty recently, this year’s fuckup doesn’t really irk me at all.  Being a Braves fan, it’s mostly just kind of business as usual, losing in the NLDS.

All the same though, woof, what a shitty day to have been a sports fan.  This really was kind of like a bloody Saturday as far as my casual fandoms go.  The Braves get bounced from the playoffs by the Phillies, Virginia Tech takes the L against an equally unimpressive Miami squad.  Normally Alabama getting upset is always kind of amazing, but the fact that it happened against Tennessee is irksome enough, but then realizing that their quarterback is Hendon Hooker, who used to be Virginia Tech’s QB before he transferred out and has developed into this Alabama-beating Jesus motherfucker, leaves a little bit of bitter in my mouth.

Also, I learned that Dikembe Mutombo has a brain tumor and is undergoing treatment, which hopefully is successful.  Those who know me well enough, know of my fandom of Mutombo, so this isn’t just sad because he’s kind of a meme, it’s sad because I genuinely have always been a fan of the guy.

And the cherry on top?  #25 JMU, my very literal hometown school in Harrisonburg, nationally ranked in probably like the first time ever, immediately loses to Georgia Southern, and undoubtedly that ranking.  Heavy is the team that wears a ranking, and even the Dukes couldn’t salvage this turrible day to be a sports fan.

Also, the Mariners just lost and are bounced, so there goes the hopes for a Padres/Mariners World Series. 😭